Flagship

Pressure grows on Biden

US President Joe Biden came under increasing pressure from senior Democrats to quit the presidential campaign. House of Representatives Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer privately told Biden he was a drag on the party’s chances in separate meetings last week, The Washington Post reported, echoing earlier messages from Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. And a senior campaign adviser warned the president that party donors’ patience was wearing thin: The Biden campaign was trailing Trump’s in fundraising even before last month’s disastrous debate. Biden, who is not campaigning due to a COVID-19 infection, is himself increasingly open to the idea of standing down, Democrats told The New York Times.

Vance vows to fight for working-class

JD Vance vowed to fight for working-class Americans “cast aside and forgotten” by Democrats. Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick also hit out at Beijing, pledging to stop China “from building their middle class on the backs of American citizens.” Vance however sidestepped thorny subjects such as abortion and Ukraine, which are some of the issues on which critics say he has repeatedly flip-flopped. On the economic front, Vance hit out at Wall Street as he built on his populist agenda, which includes reducing immigration and imposing tariffs. “When you are forced to do more with your domestic labor force, you have all of these positive dynamic effects,” Vance told The New York Times’ Ross Douthat in a wide-ranging interview.

Beijing aims to reboot economy

Chinese authorities said they would seek to bolster domestic demand and resolve the risks of a mountain of local government and real estate debt torpedoing the economy. In a statement issued after a high-profile Communist Party meeting on long-term economic priorities, the country’s leaders pledged to “deepen reform.” Details of their priorities are not expected to be outlined for days, but they did confirm that Qin Gang — a former foreign minister who was ousted last year for unspecified health reasons — was formally removed from the elite party Central Committee. As the South China Morning Post noted, however, Qin, who was viewed as close to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, was described as a “comrade,” undermining speculation that he was under investigation.

WSJ’s press freedom dilemmas

The Wall Street Journal fired one of its Hong Kong reporters, apparently over being elected chair of a local press freedom group. Selina Cheng’s dismissal comes amid a deepening crackdown by Beijing on freedoms in Hong Kong, a once-autonomous region whose media freely criticized China’s leadership. Cheng said her editors asked her to quit the union’s board, arguing it was incompatible with her job. “Such irresolution is particularly baffling coming from a newspaper that has, commendably, spared no effort to free Evan Gershkovich, its reporter who is detained in Russia,” an Asia-focused correspondent argued in The Atlantic. Gershkovich’s trial resumes today: He faces up to 20 years in jail on espionage charges the paper has denounced as a sham.

VDL set for reelection

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen looked set to win a second term in office, thanks in large part to compromise deals across the political spectrum. Describing her as a “shapeshifter extraordinaire,” Politico said she would pledge to slash red tape, boost regional competitiveness, and move climate issues to the backburner, in an effort to win over the expanded bloc of center-right lawmakers elected to the European Parliament last month. Von der Leyen did not have a smooth ride to securing support for her reelection bid: She had trumpeted her pandemic response as showing her professionalism and technocratic credentials, but on the eve of the vote, a court reprimanded the Commission for concealing the details of COVID-19 vaccine contracts.

Maduro’s election dilemma

Officials in Venezuela arrested the head of security for the country’s top opposition leader just 10 days before presidential elections. Caracas has in recent weeks ramped up its crackdown on the opposition, whose candidate is leading President Nicolás Maduro by almost two to one in independent opinion polls ahead of the vote. The government now faces a dilemma: It could allow for free elections — which it would very likely lose — or it could rig them, risking both the reimposition of international sanctions and massive protests that could topple Maduro’s administration. “Dictatorships here are all the same,” an attendee at an opposition event told The Economist. “They seem so powerful. And then they are not.”

Nigeria looks to fix budget gap

​​Nigerian President Bola Tinubu asked lawmakers to approve additional spending of $4 billion to plug shortfalls in the national budget. To increase government revenues — Nigeria collects taxes worth just 10% of GDP, one of the world’s lowest rates — Tinubu also vowed to impose a windfall tax on banks. Nigerians are suffering through the worst cost of living crisis in a generation, a situation partly caused by a rollback of an expensive but popular fuel subsidy. Although some have welcomed the change as necessary, critics say the government’s implementation failed. “Without a properly joined-up and articulated plan, Tinubu’s bitter medicine will not cure Nigeria’s ills,” the Financial Times’ editorial board argued. “It will just leave a bad taste.”

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Russia’s growing supply problem

Russia is facing a growing shortage of both labor and weapons after two and a half years of fighting in Ukraine. A lack of workers at home, as working-age men are conscripted to the military, is causing severe economic problems, The Bell reported: President Vladimir Putin boasted in May of “almost no unemployment” in Russia, but the shortage is leading to severe inflation. The country’s stockpile of Soviet-era ordnance is also running out: Russia has lost at least 8,000 armored vehicles, and cannot build new ones in sufficient quantities, The Economist noted, which may mean its armed forces need to switch to a more defensive strategy. Ukraine has its own problems: Conscription is increasingly difficult, although recent changes to the system have boosted numbers, Reuters reported.

WNBA’s record broadcast deal

A newly agreed broadcast deal for the NBA includes a sixfold increase in media rights spending for professional women’s basketball. The WNBA’s proportion of the overall deal involving Disney, NBC, and Amazon — $2.2 billion out of the overall $76 billion — remains tiny, but could rise because the agreement can be revisited in three years if the WNBA continues to grow, The Athletic reported. The fast-rising prominence of stars such as rookie phenom Caitlin Clark, who yesterday set a single-game league record for assists, makes that a growing possibility. The deal, the size of which outpaced even WNBA officials’ own stated expectations, is the latest in a series of media agreements that signal expanding interest in women’s sports.

Fermi paradox solution proposed

A scientist proposed a simple solution to the Fermi paradox, which asks why humans have never encountered aliens. The physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 pointed out that given the age of the galaxy, even slow-moving spacecraft could easily have spread across the stars, so the cosmos’ apparent emptiness was surprising. A researcher writing in Scientific American suggested one possibility: That aliens are here, but our atmosphere is sufficiently large — and their spacecraft, perhaps, sufficiently small — for us not to have noticed them. The apparent absence could be because “our sampling is inadequate to detect them… like declaring the entire ocean free of fish when none appear in a scooped-up bucket of seawater.”

• South Korea’s Supreme Court recognizes new state health insurance rights for same-sex couples.
• Turkey’s energy minister meets with his Somali counterpart to sign a hydrocarbon cooperation deal.
• The End Crowns All, a second novel reimagining a Greek myth by Bea Fitzgerald, is published.

The number of weeks this decade in which a band has held the number one spot in the UK singles chart. The Rest is Entertainment podcast noted that in the first five years of the 1980s, bands held the top spot for 146 weeks; in the 1990s, there were 141 weeks with bands at the top. Of the three band number ones in the first five years of the 2020s, one was The Beatles, and another was a collaboration of soloists. One possible reason put forward by Flagship’s middle-aged editors is that music peaked in the 1990s, although a less old-man-yells-at-clouds explanation is that the growth of at-home music production software makes it easier to be a solo artist.

Slow, by Marija Kavtaradzė. The Lithuanian director’s second feature film offers an “intimate, touching” portrait of asexuality, a subject that is underrepresented on screen, Variety noted. Opposites attract when dancer Elena and asexual sign language interpreter Dovydas meet, and their relationship — however awkward, fumbling, and sometimes fraught — embodies “moments of closeness that cannot be collapsed into lust, nor conceived as a mere preamble for something else,” Variety added. Dovydas tells Elena he doesn’t believe there’s “one correct way of being together,” and in the end, this is a story about “the many ways people can be capable of love,” The Guardian wrote.

• Trump’s call for Taiwan to pay for its defense rattles chip stocks.
• Trump backs a corporate tax cut, which JD Vance initially opposed.
• JD Vance’s energy reversal is a risky gamble on Ohio’s future.